Friday, October 9, 2015

New in Geoclue: Location sharing & convenience library

Apart from many fixes, Geoclue recently gained some new features as well.

Sharing location from phones

If you read planet GNOME, you must have seen my GSoC student, Ankit already posting about this. Basically his work enabled Geoclue to search for, and make use of any NMEA providers on the local network. The second part of this project, involved implementation of such a service for Android devices. I'm pleased that he managed to get the project working in time and even went the extra mile to fix issues with his code, after GSoC.

This is useful since GPS-based location from android is almost always going to be more accurate than WiFi-based one (assuming neighbouring WiFi networks are covered by Mozilla Location Service). This is especially useful for desktop machines since they typically do not have even WiFi hardware on them and have until now been limited to GeoIP, which at best gives city-level accurate location.

This feature was included in release 2.3.0 and you can download the Android app from here.

Conveniece library

Almost since the beginning of Geoclue2 project, many people complained that using the new API is far from easy and simple, as it should be. While we have good reasons to keep D-Bus API as it is now, the fact that a lot of time passed since I got around to doing anything about this, meant that it was best if D-Bus API was not changed, Geoclue being a system service.

So this week, I took up the task of implementing a client-side library, that not only exposes gdbus-codegen generated API to communicate with the service but also added a convenience helper API to make things very simple. Basically, you just have to call a few functions now if you simply want to get a location fix quickly and don't care much about accuracy nor interested in subsequent location updates.

I only pushed the changes today to git master so if you have any input, now would be the best time to speak up. I wouldn't want to change API after release.